Like the novel she was on trial for writing, Elif Shafak's court case began and ended with a thunderstorm.

Lined up in the open, in front of the barracks opposite the law court, the 50-odd nationalist protestors got the worst of the rain. The posters of Turkish Republican founder Kemal Ataturk were soon bedraggled, and the dozen or so European flags, marked with swastikas and the slogan "Fascist Europe" and then trodden underfoot, were brown with mud.

The weather also seemed to affect the protestors' voices. They had called Orhan Pamuk a traitor and novelist Perihan Magden a separatist whore. Today, flanked by a battalion of riot police, they sounded only querulous.

"Ataturk would have done what we are doing", insisted Emel Karadeniz, a middle-aged woman with red hennaed hair. "This Shafak is a liar and a cheat and she should be punished." Further up, protestor Fahriye Yesilcam sided with a young soldier who had leaned over the barracks wall to tell photographers to point their cameras elsewhere.

"Have you never done your military service", she shouted at one man. "It's a fine thing, a sacred duty." A burly man in a sharp grey suit - clearly one of the organisers of the protest - glided up from behind to warn her about talking to journalists.

None of them got anywhere near the court where Judge Irfan Adil Uncu heard the case. Istanbul's governor had promised extraordinary precautions yesterday, and the elegant late-Ottoman courthouse was surrounded by at least 300 riot police, in three lines. Their plainclothes colleagues packed the corridors inside. Joost Lagendijk, a Dutch MEP who was attacked at Orhan Pamuk's trial, had been provided with eight bodyguards.

"The organisation's excellent," he said, "but the key issue behind these trials is getting more and more ridiculous. To be honest, it reminds me of Eastern Europe before 1989."

Lagendijk was one of about 60 people able to squeeze into the court to hear proceedings. On one side, Elif Shafak's lawyer, Fikret Ilkiz. On the other, half a dozen lawyers for the prosecution, all of them members of Kemal Kerincsiz's ultra-nationalist Union of Lawyers. As in previous cases, they tried to turn the courtroom into a political theatre. This time, though, the judge gave them no quarter. 15 minutes after the hearing began, two of them left, obviously angry.

"He [the judge] did not allow us to speak," lawyer Ahmet Ulger said. "The result of this case was clear before it started. What we are seeing in there is a travesty of justice." His colleague Murat Inan preferred sarcasm. "Thank God we've got the inspectors in", he said, staring round at the international observers present at the trial. "Why don't they go back home and inspect their own bloody legal systems."

As the two lawyers stepped out into the crowds outside, scuffles broke out between their supporters and members of Turkey's Human Rights Association. When police arrested one of the latter, they were pounced on by human rights lawyers and received a lecture on procedure.

The lawyer behind many of the recent spate of trials against Turkish writers, Kemal Kerincsiz, preferred to pace up and down the corridor outside the courtroom. "The fact Elif Shafak isn't here today is no problem," he said. "She's bound to turn up to the next hearing."

He turned out to be wrong. In what local legal experts say is an unusual development, the prosecutor himself asked for an acquittal - a request which the judge, sitting directly under a black and gold silhouette of Ataturk, saw no reason to deny.

"With judges like this, there's no need to get rid of Article 301," constitutional expert Eser Karakas quipped, as he left the courthouse. "The nationalists will soon realise opening this sort of case is a waste of time."

Labour MEP Richard Howitt disagrees. "There are 80 such cases going on in Turkey at the moment. Most are opened for political reasons. As long as the law remains unchanged, these people will be able to carry on causing mayhem."